“Fiddler.”
Simon jerked his head around. It was the sergeant with the banjo beckoning to him.
“I seen your face,” said the sergeant. “Do you want to speak to her?”
“Yes!”
“Go down there and tell the chaplain that you’d like to ask what the ladies wish to hear for the toast. This is what the army calls a dining-in, ladies are introduced. Then the music starts, toast, everybody bows, the ladies leave.”
The black color sergeant carefully turned the peg on his fifth string. He spoke in a low voice like the voice of a spirit of temptation or aid in a time of need. Simon put his hand on the sergeant’s shoulder and leaned in to listen.
“So slide down there and keep your head low and speak real quiet to the chaplain and say that you’d like to know what the ladies want to hear.”
“Thank you,” Simon said. “What’s his whole name? The colonel?”
“Franklin Webb. You just call him Colonel sir.”
“Do I salute?”
“Not if you want to look like a civilian.”
Simon tucked his fiddle against his left side in the crook of his wrist and the bow in the fingers of his left hand and he slid like a haint from the makeshift stage. He continued silently along the wall and moved past standing officers in both blue and gray with their drinks in their hands. He reached the back of the mess hall in a quick, ghostly, reptilian slide.
The chaplain was talking and smiling at Colonel Webb and the women. He wore the black coat and cloth-covered buttons of a Union Army chaplain, and as Simon came to stand at the man’s side he felt her eyes on him. She gracefully turned her entire body to regard him, her skirts swinging. Simon turned to her in what he thought would only be a passing glance but he was held there. Her eyes were a clear, dark blue. After a second or two of paralysis, he inclined his head to her and then had enough sense to turn and address the chaplain.
“Sir, chaplain, sir,” said Simon in a low voice.
The chaplain swiveled his head, looked Simon up and down. “Ah? I uh . . .”
“Yes, sir, I just was wondering if the ladies had a song in mind or a song they would prefer to sing, I mean to have played for the toast, or you know, when you, when the dinner begins here . . .”
Just shut up now, he told himself. He kept his eyes resolutely on the chaplain. Colonel Webb turned and with one hand pressed the girl away from him and out of the way as if she were a chair or a door. Then Webb bent his gaze upon Simon with a What is this going on? expression on his bearded face.
“Do the ladies have a song they prefer,” said the chaplain to Webb by way of explanation. The colonel’s wife had a set face and a pair of tightly shut hands in lace mittens. The girl with the black hair was finally able to step away from that hand and bent to the child and spoke to her. Simon watched her graceful movements, noted the ray of sunlight that fell on her hair and danced over the braided crown. Her flushed face. Simon was only a fiddler of a defeated army, but he would have given a great deal to catch this man alone. To have shoved that girl the way he did. He managed to smile at her, a quick bow.
The girl tugged at her mother’s lacy sleeve. “Mama,” she said.
“Oh well, then, do they?” Webb stared at Simon carefully. “Have a song they prefer?” He had the manner of men who have just come through a hot battle, in fact a losing battle, and Simon knew the colonel would still be strung taut and vigilant. There would be no quiet in his heart. Enemies everywhere. Simon bent from the waist.
“Colonel, sir,” he said.
Colonel Webb’s wife put her hand on his elaborately braided coat sleeve and said, “My dear, Josephina says her governess would very much like to hear a song from Ireland.”
Governess. All right. Irish.
Webb took out a handkerchief and patted his forehead. Like everyone, he was longing for the moment the sun went down. “An Irish song,” he said. “Mostly sounds like bawling out of tune. Well, go ahead then.” He glanced at the girl with a kind of secret contempt. “What is it? What do you want to hear?”
Simon knew it was rude of the colonel not to use the girl’s name, but now he could look her in the eye again, into her beautiful dark blue eyes. She had a broad forehead and a quick manner, a relieved smile now that she was beyond reaching distance.
“I hope I can play whatever you wish,” Simon said, with a polite smile. He was grateful to be wearing a clean white shirt instead of the old homespun grimed with gunpowder and bacon grease. So grateful that he felt strangely elevated and different. Her gaze made him different, he could not say how.
She tipped her head back and forth as if trying to decide and then said, “And would you know ‘The Minstrel Boy’?” She spoke in a wonderful Irish lilt.
To Simon’s enormous relief, he knew it. It was another sign that this was meant. This was a meant thing.
“I do! I do indeed,” he said and he was afraid his tone was too eager, idiotic, or perhaps on the other hand maybe it was too reserved. He didn’t know which. Her round face and little black drop earrings. He could tell she had a narrow rib cage all bounded in a vertical stripe as slim as her waist. And God above she was shorter than he was. She gazed into his face with that intent expression and he felt that he might begin melting or dissolving in some way. He cleared his throat. “I am honored to play it for you, Miss. I am delighted.”
And he was even more delighted when nobody corrected him when he said Miss.
The colonel turned to Simon; condescending, irritated. He said, “Why are we messing around with this? Play whatever you want.” He moved away with one hand on his wife’s elbow, and the girl with the black hair and the child fell obediently into his train as he escorted them to their places. She sat down with a whirl of skirts and a straight back, her hands in her lap. Simon would have bet good money that every man in the dining hall had his eye on her but none of them had seen what he had seen and did not realize that here was a creature of great beauty in need of rescue or comfort or a staunch defender, none of which was in his power right now; only music.
Simon slid along the wall, through knots of men in blue uniforms and officer’s insignia, most of which he could not read. Around groups of men in butternut or gray. There was an unsettled and brittle feeling in the hall; men who had surrendered to men they had just beaten. He slipped back to the bandstand. Strange how a musical instrument in your hand made you the innocent of the world. He stepped up onto the creaking boards of the bandstand that had been hammered together at the last moment and said, “Listen. They want an opening song called ‘The Minstrel Boy,’ men, it’s an Irish slow air, used to be called ‘The Moreen,’ four-four time and I’m going to do it in C, are we agreed?”
The black color sergeant nodded to himself. “He has breasted the walls of the fortifications.”
“Did I?” Simon paused and then laughed. “Yes, sir, maybe so.”
The color sergeant, now a banjo player, regarded the group with a sergeant’s critical eye that they all duly recognized. “Ready?”
Simon said, “Wagons ho.” And then, “One two, one-two-three . . .” and slid the horsehair down the strings.
He put his heart into it; many knew the melody but few knew the words. It was long, slow, and full of yearning, it lifted all the faces to him and tilted them over into the stream of magic, some long-ago time when the wars had not yet begun, before the first shot and before the first lie and the first burning. When all was summer again and the cattle were safe in a green field. Simon heard the guitars bring off harmonizing chords and they all instinctively turned to Damon and gave him the bridge. He lilted it up into the high octaves and handed it back to them.